$1 Million Gift to UC Davis Honors Edward Teller

Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, June 15, 1999

A $1 million grant to the University of California at Davis will be used to create an endowed professorship in the name of famed nuclear physicist Edward Teller, university officials announced yesterday.

Teller, 91, helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II and later championed development of the so-called super-bombs, hydrogen-based thermonuclear weapons that changed the course of post-war history.

But he is perhaps best known not for his scientific and academic accomplishments, but for his damaging testimony against fellow physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, delivered during 1954 loyalty proceedings that eventually cost Oppenheimer his top-secret security clearance.

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The testimony, though ambiguous on its face, badly tarnished Teller's standing among his peers, generating bad blood in academic circles that seems to have persisted throughout his long career.

Despite the controversies, university officials said Teller deserves full credit as one of the 20th century's top scientists and a shaper of history.

"The controversies were discussed, but in the end it was clear that none of that outweighed his contributions," said UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef.

Teller was applauded yesterday at a luncheon held in his honor at Livermore's Wente Winery.

"Today, our main trouble is that people are afraid of science," he told the gathering of about 50 people.

One reason for the unease, he said, is that modern theories of relativity and quantum mechanics "are contradictory to common sense."

During a news conference later, he bristled when asked whether he believed any of his own activities also may have played a role.

"Everything that is discovered can be used or misused," he said, adding that he believes the role of scientists should be limited to investigating facts, devising applications and then explaining options to citizens and government decisionmakers.

He had no apologies for helping develop modern-day weaponry. As for Oppenheimer, Teller called him ''a good physicist and on the whole a really good director" of the government lab at Los Alamos. But Teller declined to answer questions about the controversies of the 1950s, saying only: "I was under oath then. I am not now."

The professorship endowed in Teller's name was set up with an unsolicited $1 million grant from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. Teller was a longtime friend of the late John Hertz, founder of Hertz Rent-A-Car.

The first Teller professorship will be held by Richard Freeman, current chair of the applied science department. He called Teller "a giant in graduate educational policy" and "an icon in scientific achievement."

But Freeman also acknowledged that some hard feelings about Teller persist in scientific circles. "Some people will raise their eyebrows," Freeman said, but he added that the bitterness seems largely to have faded over the years.